November 1, 2023 - 10:00am
With the passage of time comes distance, and perspective. It is more than three years since that strange summer of 2020, when the entire Western world was convulsed by the George Floyd protests, organised by local Black Lives Matter groups, and the accompanying moral panics over statues, police racism and “white supremacy”.
It is no surprise, then, that we are now seeing investigations into what happened to some of the huge amounts of money raised for BLM. Xahra Saleem, a BLM activist who helped to organise the violent disorder that culminated in the attack on Bristol’s Edward Colston statue, has just been jailed for stealing donations intended for an anti-racism group that she set up.
In 2020, across the world, money poured into BLM chapters, not least from large corporations keen to demonstrate to the public and to their junior employees that they were on the side of social justice. Questions about what exactly was going to happen to that money — amounting eventually to the equivalent of hundreds of millions of pounds, globally — were unwelcome in the near-hysterical atmosphere of the time.
In the US there has already been considerable fallout from that lack of due diligence. One of the founders of BLM, Patrisse Cullors, controversially bought a house worth $1.4 million. There are several ongoing lawsuits involving alleged misuse of money by other members, and a body called the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation has faced searching questions from its own supporters about the purchase of a $6 million property, all while grassroots projects are struggling for funds.
Most political or social movements attract a few people with dubious motives or an eye for the main chance. The presence of fraudsters does not necessarily call into question the justice of a movement. However, when a particular cause is hedged around with taboos, enforced by establishment media, to the extent that obvious questions about governance, spending and oversight are simply not asked, that cause will attract grifters like moths to a flame. BLM was and is a classic example.
The great tension between its media-friendly public image — who could possibly disagree that black lives matter? — and the enormously radical aims espoused by various parts of the organisation was rarely explored, certainly at the height of the Summer of Floyd and in the subsequent couple of years.
I cannot recall the BBC or any similar news organisation placing BLM under the same kind of scrutiny to which any other campaign group would have been subjected. Someone who depends on the BBC for their analysis and insight into current affairs would have no idea that BLM not only favours the abolition of almost the entire criminal justice system as currently constituted, but is also profoundly opposed to the married family and to free expression, and adopts a fundamentally Marxist view of the world. The organisation is protected by the incredibly strong contemporary taboos around racial matters.
So powerful are these taboos that even conservative politicians have fought shy of breaking them. Some high-profile Tories courted controversy in 2020 for their criticism of “taking the knee”, with Dominic Raab perhaps the most famous example. Yet even they did not dare to publicly articulate a thoroughgoing critique of the practice and its racially divisive intent, instead making half-joking remarks about only kneeling for their wives. And it is exactly this reluctance to engage in honest argument about difficult subjects that is exploited by grifters like Xahra Saleem. It is unlikely hers will be the last case of its kind.
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SubscribeIn the inimitable words of Hyman Roth in The Godfather II, Xahra Saleem is small potatoes. Just one of any number of grifters all over the world who rip off the well-intentioned but credulous.
The real danger is that in the name of diversity and inclusion millions of children are now being taught race-baiting idiocy like “white people invented slavery” as a matter of fact.
This is the main problem & with social media it is so easy now to tell a lie to sell your extremist propaganda .
Social media is bad, but look at the likes of the BBC, even worse.
Fairly soon the BBC will be commonly seen for what it is …. just another social media site run and fed by attention seekers desperate for the approval of their fellow bubble dwellers.
The only difference is that the BBC is on the way down.
“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” Eric Hoffer
Yes, Amnesty International is a classic example
The RSPB also
???
Look at their record on wind farms and the number of birds of prey they kill. Which of these does the RSPB choose to support and protect?
Royal Society for the Protection of Birds
And Stonewall
Definitely, Stonewall shouldn’t just be expelled from any role in spreading it’s propaganda, disguised as consultancy,in the Public sector, Unions, charities and civil service, it should be forced to go into liquidation.
God, I love Hoffer. I need to dust off some of my books for another reading…
It’s always worth looking with cynical eyes at any organisation that sells feeling good.
Although it is not the be all and end all try looking at formal Religion as an industry selling salvation. Look at charities that started out addressing a need like famine relief and have swung around to lobbying as a more certain revenue stream (I did say this was a cynical view). Political parties that end up supporting vested interests. Union bosses that pay themselves well. The list goes on – because people who make their careers in this type of work rise to the top and change the priority of the original aims of the organisation to something more personally rewarding.
My guess is that deficiencies in accounting in BLM have come to early recognition because the grifters were less practiced than usual. Now that’s cynical.
As a basic rule, any organisation which claims (or it is claimed on their behalf) to be above legitimate scrutiny because its cause is so self-evidently righteous and its morality so unquestionably unimpeachable is probably hiding something.
… e.g. the Kids Company.
I think it was Orwell who opined that “every saint should be considered guilty until proven innocent”?
Isn’t maths racist according to CRT? Perhaps that explains their deficiencies in accounting?
And what a contrast with the great civic generosity of Edward Colston.
I live in Bristol, and have toyed with the idea of renaming my home “Colston House”.
Being reported in The Times and the Guardian where no comments are allowed on either. I have had a decent look around the BBC website, drilling down to England and found an article under Bristol but nothing in England visible or the main pages.
The Guardian doesn’t open comments on any article which is likely to result in people saying things its owners, editors and staff don’t want to hear.
“Comment is Free” was a statement of journalistic principle under C.P. Scott, but is no more than gaslighting under Katherine Viner.
Just so – they used to allow them, but then it was made a safe space. I suspect it was the staff who demanded it – as far as I could see the commenters of all poltical stripes were enjoying the debate, which only rarely became a melee. Before the shutdown, they often censored comments: the only site I’ve ever had a comment removed from – though to be fair they reinstituted it after my complaint. Coddled mods who can’t tell the difference between an opinion and abuse, silence and violence.
I abandoned commenting on the Grauniad some years ago (just after the Brexit referendum). The tone of the comments became more spiteful and contrary views became more likely to be censored.
There are a few other websites I used to comment on but the tone of the debates soured and became one-note authoritarian.
Life is too short to engage with unreasonable people.
I still run through the Guardian comments once a week or so for educational purposes, but it’s hard – nothing is ever just ‘wrong’, it’s always ‘they’re lying to you’; nothing can be a matter of opinion, it must always be progressive truth vs fascist wingnut fake news. Apart from a few sad old geezers like me, who do they think is reading this tosh? Though they all apparently believe that Polly Toynbee is scouring every comment on her piece looking for validation, sadly.
I was a Guardian-reader during my twenties. These days I find it completely unreadable.
I finally realised commenting on the Guardian was pointless when I had a post moderated which simply repeated by way of agreement one of the points made above-the-line.
When you are censored for agreeing with the published article, you know you’ve hit the bottom of the rabbit hole.
Its such a shame because they have lost some quality contributors in their drive for conformity. I really enjoyed reading Hadley Freeman and while I often disagreed with Suzanne Moore on political questions, I never doubted her capacity to form the cogent argument with which I disagreed. Many of the commentators who are left are either completely neutered by acquiescence to editorial diktats or, in my opinion, just a bit dim.
Many years ago , decades , I used to read the Guardian but then it went full on Marxist and nonsense and Iies and I dropped it like a hot potato .
Nanny Graun also censors the paper’s circulation figures since 2021.
Possibly they were falling so fast that it was impossible to even see the number.
They sacked Malcom Muggeridge when he reported on the famine in the Ukraine in the early 1930s, so nothing has changed.
For as long as certain bad actors can convince gullible white liberals that they are oppressed and the white liberals seek absolution from their sin of their white supremacy, the grifters in the form of trainers, public speakers, academics and pundits on daytime TV will be able to pursue a lucrative career. It’s just a pity that those liberals lacking in any self respect also hold budgets in mainstream media, universities and churches
Wow, politicians in Britain actually took the knee. Next, you’ll be throwing tea into the Thames. That is completely bonkers! Your cops don’t even carry guns!
Those that took the knee really showed their total ignorance of everything .
Good comment, but would you mind in future quarantining “took the knee” inside quote marks where this ridiculous phrase belongs.
I didn’t realise that this platform went in for censorship .
Oh the irony and so has this comment !
And that, my man, is why the UK has almost NO deaths and injuries from gunshot wounds. There are police specially trained to carry guns, but they are deployed in emergencies only. And the prevailing feeling here is that that is just as it should be.
Your quaint British Bobbys wouldn’t last a day in New York. Here in the Upside/Down everyone carries guns, and we send cops to jail when they use theirs.
Some of them do, but only to pointlessly show off while hanging around on street corners ignoring crime.
Hanging around on a street corner? Too cold for that; more than the job’s worth. Nah – nice and warm in the car/office….. and safer – after all it’s the job of police to keep things safe.
They did in the US too – lots of them – in fact the whole thing is American in origin. Including the specific nature of the insult – kneeling during the US anthem – which does not carry through to the UK, particularly because our MP-kneelers did so at Floyd memorials rather than during the anthem (we are also relatively relaxed about the national anthem, respecting the flag etc).
As for our police not carrying guns – that position has been the poplular one for a long time, by a slight margin, which may change. It makes sense, given that the UK homicide rate is about 15% of the US’s, and our ‘shooter-on-the loose problem’ is a fraction of 1% of the USA’s.
Weird that people would get all upset about someone kneeling while someone else sings some crappy song while those same people are super chill about the police murdering citizens in full view.
Yes, it reminds of two commenters on this site who recently explained to me how it is in the States – viz: ‘America’s apparent gun problem is not actually a gun problem, per se, or much of a problem in general, as the ‘vast majority’ of those killed are black, and most of those killings carried out by ‘gangsters’. Also, that white people who were killed whilst living in downtown, or majority black areas have only themselves to blame. Did you think, perchance, these weird phenomena are related?
An interesting perspective coming from someone who advocated throwing the Canadian truckers and their supporters in jail for their temerity in challenging Trudeau’s ludicrous vaccine mandate. Also, some of those shot dead by police (e.g. Alton Sterling, Michael Brown) brought it on themselves.
I think you missed my point.
Oops – is that a whoosh noise I heard going over my head?
The whole woke movement is a home for grifters including all those non-productive roles in DEI, ESG and the rest. When you marry luxury beliefs with a need to find work for 50% of young folk going to university, don’t be surprised if parasitic roles is the outcome. There aren’t enough real jobs going around and a decade of 0% interest rates can weather it on the p and l. 6%? Let’s watch.
BLM is a racist organization. It’s in its name – that ‘Black’ Lives Matter. Not White, not European, not African (with its multiple ethnicities), not Asian (with ITS multiple ethnicities), not Jewish, not Christian, not Muslim, not Buddhist, not Hindu. ‘Black’ Lives Matter, as if to say that ONLY ‘Black’ Lives Matter.
White lives matter.
White Lives Matter!
Generally agree.
Let’s see some articles about the amount of Populist grifting that goes on too to hoodwink and rip off the credulous. I suspect the sums involved dwarf BLM
In hind sight I can’t believe that many of us in the West allowed ourselves to be ripped off by religion Again!
Fool me once…
https://apnews.com/general-news-united-states-government-7b8d0f5ce9cb4cadad948c2c414afd57
Who’d ha thunk it?
https://apnews.com/article/border-wall-donald-trump-steve-bannon-15db1e18f3cd46a87bc395b14b2bcf15
Shocking
So therefore Cullors, Kendi and the other race hustlers are justified? Whataboutism isn’t an argument, to the contrary, it’s just a dodge that woke shitweasels love to use because they have nothing of substance to back their absurd assertions. Weak, weak, weak.